Reseller concern: File Manager is showing my provider's domain name

I'm a webhosting reseller who's gone with CPanel-providing webhosts for somewhere between 6-8 years now, I think.

My provider recently upgraded Cpanel to version 11.1-EDGE, build 8908. (I'm not sure what version we upgraded FROM.)

During an investigation of a customer problem with email after this upgrade, I discovered that CPanel's email storage file structure apparently changed. I'd used File Manager in the past to investigate some email issues, so I was familiar with what the old structure was... and was surprised to see things split out into "new", "cur", and "tmp" subdirectories.

I was also surprised to see that the names of the actual individual message files stored within those directories ends with "server.myhostingprovider.net" !!

(At first, I thought this was a glitch and was limited to only this customer's one mailbox. However, my provider basically proved to me that this is happening for all email server-wide.)

I expressed my annoyance at this, since any customer of mine could use File Manager to stumble onto the same thing... and thereby figure out who my provider is... and possibly "cut out the middle man" / ie. ME !!

My provider simply said "that's the way CPanel is writing the files now. There's nothing we can do about it."

Is this true? Is there indeed nothing they can do (since obviously, CPanel's pulling this phrase from some configuration value somewhere)?

What you're seeing is the maildir format for email storage. This is controlled using the courier-imap server daemon which uses the servers hostname in the generated filename to keep it unique under the standard cPanel installation. This isn't the only place where you'll see the servers hostname used (for example look at any email passing through the server) and is something you can expect to see if you use a shared hosting environment. It's for this reason that many hosts that allow resellers often use generic hostnames instead of host specific ones. There nothing that you can do about it.

I was also surprised to see that the names of the actual individual message files stored within those directories ends with "server.myhostingprovider.net" !!

(At first, I thought this was a glitch and was limited to only this customer's one mailbox. However, my provider basically proved to me that this is happening for all email server-wide.)

I expressed my annoyance at this, since any customer of mine could use File Manager to stumble onto the same thing... and thereby figure out who my provider is... and possibly "cut out the middle man" / ie. ME !!

Click to expand...

A smart provider uses a different domain name for their own services and
their server hostnames for exactly the reason you described above.

In example, nearly all our servers use some form of the "safeshops.net"
domain as the server hostname but none of our 76 hosting and dedicated
server services go by the name "SafeShops" in any form or manner.

This of course makes knowing the server hostname of little use to
to the customers of any resellers on any particular server.

Now if your provider is ethical, they may have some sort of "non-compete"
policy in effect as we do at our service. Basically in a nutshell, we do not
allow any resold customer to purchase any account from us directly without
the prior written consent from the reseller and vice versa.

If a reseller's customer from a reseller under us finds out that we are the
reseller's provider, it won't do them any good because they can't signup
with us directly because of our non-compete policies. Even if the reseller's
account is first discontinued from the reseller, we still require the original
reseller's written permission before they can submit an application with us.

You may want to ask your provider if they have any policies like that!

(If not, feel free to contact me privately and I can give you our information )